There are many in the world whose disappearance would be far more welcome than yours - welcome back, look forward to reading new reza-encoded content soon!

Subb-haqqua Nyarlathothep %~]

Likewise.

Welcome back...

Welcome back! Hope everything ok.

it is very annoying - even though I delete the spams and ban the IPs, I still get around 10-20 every day.
A community-built blacklist might work, but it seems that a lot of these spams are originated from dial-up addresses so they change each time - and one doesn't want to block a whole range of IPs since there may be 'real' users there too...thanks for the links though, I will check out some of these and let you know if I find any that work.

Otherwise, the only way to stop them is to subscribe to some sort of 'membership' scheme whereby only 'validated' people are allowed to comment.
Myself I find this 'feature' extremely irritating and counterproductive on other blogs (if I have to log in, I don't bother to comment), so I don't want to implement it myself. If you choose deregulated information flow, you have to live with the consequences! I just turn off the comments sometimes to have a break...

Very glad you are alright, Reza. Did your friend tell you I was trying to contact you when I was in your perplexing and vampiric land? Anyway, best.

Re: spam fighting

Blacklist helps, but it doesn't eliminate the problem all together. I recently read somewhere that changing the mt-comments.cgi file helps reduce the amount of spam as well, which makes sense. Abe should know what that means. The blogs I have that use WordpPress instead of Movable Type get barely any spam at all, which I suspect is because most blog spammers are looking for the mt-comments.cgi file.

glad that you are back reza. hope to see some more interesting stuff on the site .. would it be too personal to ask if your experience offline has provoked any interesting developments in your own thinking?